I give up

I feel more and more like Lily Tomlin every day: No matter how cynical I get, I can’t keep up.

Just like week I invented an imaginary supervillain for whom Play-Doh: The Motion Picture, Boggle: The Movie, and Trivial Pursuit: The Next Generation seemed beyond the pale, something only the depths of his depravity could come up with. It was satire. It was my auditioning for a spot on the Onion’s writing staff.

But even The Onion is indistinguishable from reality these days.

So I give up. I fucking give up. Do you hear that, universe? I’m done. Because now we have this:

Scribes Dan and Kevin Hageman are penning the script for the family comedy that will mix live action and animation. Warners is keeping the plot tightly under wraps, but it’s described as an action adventure set in a Lego world.

Oh, they’re keeping the plot tightly under wraps? The fucking plot?

It’s bricks. Lego is plastic bricks. They’re seriously cool and all — I personally own, no kidding, a giant tub of 1,200 of them — but there is no fucking plot. There’s no plot.

There. Is. No. Plot.

They’re plastic bricks.

I mean: What the hell?

Dan Lin, who is shepherding Warner Bros.’ “Sherlock Holmes” and exec produced the studio’s upcoming family film “Shorts,”

Having seen Shorts and having heard of this stupid concept for a Legos movie, I am now deeply worried about the Sherlock Holmes flick.

will produce the movie through his Lin Pictures, which is also behind a “Tom and Jerry” film that will put the feuding animated characters in a live-action setting. The shingle’s Stephen Gilchrist serves as co-producer.

Oh please god, no: A live-action Tom and Jerry movie? *sob*

Directors and producers in town have attempted to make a Lego movie for years, approaching the Danish toymaker with various ideas, but Lego turned down most of them because it’s highly protective of its brand.

…

But the company sparked to Lin and the Hageman brothers’ embrace of core values Lego wanted to include in a film, especially “a fun factor, creativity and that imagination has no boundaries,” Lin told Daily Variety.

Now, come on: The minute you settle a concept into a film, and put it up on the screen, you have boundaried the imagination. You’ve said: This is what it is.

This is not about imagination and creative play. It’s about selling more Legos. It seems to me that this would be like making a movie about Cheerios to sell more Cheerios in a world where every-fucking-body who is going to eat Cheerios is already doing so, but what do I know? I’m not a fabulously wealthy Hollywood studio executive. They must be very smart indeed to be so well paid.